Google could not fulfill its promise to reduce its dependence on search revenue

The world-wide known search engine Google had a 5-year plan intended to reduce its dependence on search revenue to 65% by next year. Which, apparently, didn’t work right.

According to the local media reports, this figure appeared in the paperwork related to the Google vs. Oracle trial and showed that in fact Google was off its targets by many miles. The plan saw the company receiving over 35% of its 2013 revenue from outside its search operation. That’s what Google wanted to reach back in 2010.

It seems that Internet commerce and an initiative to bring Google services to TV were on the list of things Google was going to shift to. After the experts saw the paper, they most likely laughed and assumed that Google TV and commerce ambitions didn’t really happen. According to Herman Leung, Susquehanna Financial Group analyst, two years ago Google was a little more aggressive than it is now.

Actually, the projections for the company’s different businesses were part of a presentation to Google’s board of directors two years ago. The search giant tried to convince American District Judge William Alsup to keep the papers secret, saying they were commercially sensitive. At the same time, making the company look silly over failing to meet its goals doesn’t count as “commercially sensitive” to the judge. Jim Prosser, a spokesman for the company, claimed that the papers didn’t represent current thinking about its business operations, but he forgot to say why it was so important to have this data suppressed.

The paper also reveals how Google sees an emerging threat from cooperation between the largest social network in the world, Facebook, and Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Google was worried that Facebook-Bing users might bypass it. Meanwhile, its own YouTube business was estimated to generate $5 billion by 2013, due to a $3 billion contribution from its own TV project, which actually never happened.